One thing we gotta get out of the way when we speak in Guyana – or the Caribbean – about “African” culture is that we have a greater legitimacy to do so, because our African citizens were brought here from all parts of West Africa – from Angola in the south to Senegal in the north. This includes the Congo, Ghana and Nigeria, just to mention some of the more popular names. So, we can immediately appreciate that, while in Africa – even within what we call Ghana today – there are dozens of ethnic groups or tribes, during the hundreds of years of enslavement, those cultural differences were homogenised as the Whites tried to grind their culture out of them in totality.
But what was surprisingly not given credit for the retentions of our African cultural is that, AFTER the Abolition of Slavery in 1838, there were over 13,000 Africans brought DIRECTLY from Africa and transported to Guyana to work as Indentured Immigrants!! That’s right – not as slaves, but as indentured servants – to drive down the wage aspirations of the freedmen and women just like the other indentureds had been used to do!! So, how were they brought?? Well, after the Brits abolished the slave trade in 1807, and then emancipation was given in 1838, other countries – such as Brazil and Cuba, which continued with slavery – kept on shipping their African “cargo”. The British Navy was assigned to patrol the coast of West Africa, and intercept these slave ships and liberate their cargo.
The “liberated” Africans were sent generally to Liberia or Sierra Leone, from where they were persuaded to emigrate to the West Indies. One unintended consequence of this latter arrival when African cultural practices weren’t seen as a threat was that, after the Indentured Africans were distributed to plantations in all three countries, they became the nucleus and catalyst for the flowering of African culture. Among the new arrivals were Igbo, Kalabari, Mende, Temne, Mandinka, Yoruba; and, above all, West Central Africans such as Kru and Congolese.
If we were to map the areas where there are more significant expressions of African Culture, you can bet that some of the new arrivals were settled there in greater numbers – like in Bagotville on the West Bank of Demerara. After their Indentureship, some returned to Sierra Leone, but, like other Indentureds, most remained. They gravitated to African Villages, and bought lands whereon their immigrant drive for economic improvement soon made them exemplars.
Some African cultural retentions have spread in the wider Guyanese populace in the kind of food we eat. While we may think of foo-foo and conkie, let’s not forget that the entire repertoire of “ground provision” dishes, from soups (including metemjee) to “boiled and fried” are of African provenance!!
Leh we nyam them!!
…a favour
Mad Maduro is a real ingrate!! Here it is that Panamanian President José Raúl Molino has offered to assist him to leave his country and relocate to a third nation following the elections which he stole. This was to facilitate a political transition, and he didn’t have to go through the hardship of crossing the Darien Gap as millions of those whom he drove out of Venezuela!! According to Molino, the essence of his initiative is Panama’s willingness to act as a bridge for Maduro, allowing for a safe transition from Venezuela to another country. “If that’s the contribution, the sacrifice that Panama has to make, by offering our soil so that this man and his family can leave Venezuela, Panama would do it without a doubt,” Molino has said.
But rather than thanking Molino, Mad Maduro snarkily replied that he would have to learn Molino’s name, as he rejected the proposal and accused the Panamanian president of being overly influenced by the “gringos”!! The latter, of course, is the derogatory term to describe American Whites!!
What a jerk!!
…Indigenous Peoples
Even though your Eyewitness wrote ahead that last Friday was gonna be Indigenous Peoples Day, he still didn’t see the mass participation he had expected by us coastlanders – for them allowing us to squat on their lands!!
